Everyone is paranoid about pregnant women going on rampages and killing abortion doctors. This is a very, very unlikely scenario. The details will quickly emerge concerning the woman's consent to the abortion, and she will be tried normally, I would think.

A more interesting question is whether a man is justified in attacking the pregnant mother of his child if she attempts to have it aborted. The man should be covered just as much as the woman by this law, since it concerns the right to protect one's children (unborn, foetal, or otherwise). The woman who seeks an abortion without the man's consent is therefore engaging in an act of unsolicited violence on the man's child.

Is he therefore justified, or of diminished responsibility, if he attacks her?

It is a bit harsh not to have any sympathy for a woman facing the death penalty and otherwise inhumane conditions for drug smuggling. Even the worst kind of criminal imaginable deserves humane treatment and a sentence proportional to the crime.

But I definitely understand the bitterness directed at this woman. It is a commonly known fact that South-East Asian countries harbour extremely harsh sentences for drug trafficking, and she should have known that. The fact that she did it anyway does hint at a certain attitude of impunity, by virtue of her "first world" heritage.

The reason it shocks us that white people get jailed for decades in Thailand or Laos for drug smuggling is because we fundamentally think that people from the first world are above the law in third world countries. We're not. We think that the consulate or the embassy can bail us out if anything bad happens. Sometimes they can't.

I think it's that arrogance that's at the root of the lack of sympathy a lot of people are expressing here, and I share that sentiment, to an extent. Still, some sympathy is due.

Firstly, I would take issue with your article's, and Mr. Brown's use of "Communism" as distinct from "communism". This is a clumsy and unimaginative distinction, and ultimately disingenuous. Brown, a self-professed liberal conservative, has an interest in equating the "half-baked" idea of communism with Soviet Russia and its satellites. This is inaccurate, and as a Sovietologist, he should know better.

The USSR was never communist, nor was it Communist. It would better be termed Stalinist, later reformed. Communism is a catch-all term that's intentionally nebulous, and using it in so cavalier a fashion can only be a political manoeuvre.

We can objectively call the USSR authoritarian, insular, possessed of a command economy, but we can't objectively call much of anything communism. The most shrill right-wing pundits in America and the UK would like nothing more than to have a picture of Soviet Russia next to the Webster's entry for "communism". It's the easiest way to permanently discredit the idea, to smugly declare "communism just doesn't work".

It's a tired analogy, but "does capitalism?"

A final point, your article stated that in much of the world there is stigma attached to the term socialist, and that in the USA it amounts to hate speech. This is patently untrue. There is not a single country I can think of besides the USA which has not seriously flirted with socialism, and where it remains a viable and respected political ideology. All of Latin America, of course, the vast majority of post-colonial Africa, almost all of Asia (Singapore excepted), and of course, Europe is essentially a social-democratic collective of states.

Also, note the extremely influential communist parties in India, Japan, and many Middle Eastern countries (notably Iraq, pre-Saddam). I'm afraid the USA is quite alone in its stigmatisation of socialism.

Anyone who writes "life thrives in a balance between natural imbalance and balance" is obviously using multiple definitions of the word at the same time. That's good for metaphors and poems. Hard science requires something more specific.

Excellent point. To be honest, I think the author was being intentionally disingenuous by not presenting a clear-cut definition of balance. It feels like he needed to write an article, so he intentionally inhabited the spaces of ambiguity between definitions to make a non-argument.

The only thing I can draw from your article, Jonathon, is that you're somehow in favour of representing nature in terms of "balance" because that would make our relationship with it more emotive. Even if this means refuting or "reinterpreting" scientific fact. If you need to view nature as "balanced" to have an emotive connection with it, that's your problem, not something that we should cleave to. Nature doesn't have a homeostatic function, and it's pointless and damaging to try to force one on it